A rant: Remembering my mantra

I think of the human beings born with a congenital heart defect.  I think about the child’s parents facing the words from the physician.  I think of the doctor’s family in the comparison in her own mind as she visualizes husband or wife and or daughters or son that currently exist, previously existed or only in her dreams.  I think of these iterations of people thinking.  

I think of the child growing past the hurdle of immediate surgery detected by the abnormal murmur detected in a chest, listened to and followed by such worry.  The worry would come in waves of a tide.  Did he wake up this morning?  Will I wake up tomorrow?  Will she make it home from school?  I think of progression from toddler to junior high to high school to the potential of a graduate program.  The abnormal potential stalks like a debt collector.   

I think of the child born in Somalia with the same ailment pricked by death's stinger with a bullet, famine, some divergent variation never knowing the cardiac abnormality and parents weeping unnamable tears.  I think of the drug wars and the slaveries of poverty, Brazilians in sugar cane fields, Indians in Bhopal.  I think of Haitians on one side of an island and European and American tourists flocking to Punta Cana on the other.  I think of the minds of Afghani children bartering opium fields, militant caves and the breasts of their mother.  I think of a Chinese couple creating an anchor baby in California, flying back to avoid a one child limit and a link for their daughter to go to an American university.  I think of cell phone factories and crimpled hands and bowls of rice noodles.  I think of South African Aids children and the distance between their daily thoughts and my consideration of the performance in my IRA.   

I think of in vitro fertilization and abortion deliberations between couples or women alone over coffee cups.  I think of Honey Boo-Boo and NPR competing.  I think of oil-slicked pelicans, DDT, global warming, hurricanes and a man throwing his cigarette out his Hummer in traffic next to my idling engine at the red light.  I think of an all you can eat Golden Corral buffet and  a coworker getting his stomach stapled and how he dared not go swimming at the company pool party held at his estate.  I think of people’s obsession to get every possible tax deduction, but going through the drive through at McDonalds’ in pick-up trucks hauling nothing, but themselves.  

I think of the statue of Jesus over Rio de Janeiro.  I think of the walls in Jerusalem.  I think of the mountain entrances in Jordan.  I think of le Notre Dame in Paris.  I think of an unnamed field at day and at night seeing a chess board of stars above, the time it took for that light to get here and the spots in the greater darkness and the light that did not.  I think of before the bang.  I think of Texas school board text book debates.  I think of the power of trusting the greater number of thinking Muslims of the world, the misunderstanding of the Western World and realize the power of love of family, of child, of parent to the beating hearts and the arrogant ignorance of weaponized drones and assumptions that a parent does not want the same for his or her child as the shadows of time zones shift on the sun’s reception angle on our infinitesimal planet.  

Mothers and fathers would tease themselves in dreams of Faustian bargains to trade places or the blessings of what others outside those beeping hospital rooms would deem problems worthy of worry.  Fears of social ignominy or isolation weigh against the equilibrium of not death, but the specter and realistic plausible scenarios of death tapping on the window pane entering at banal hours over the years of palpitations of a child’s defected heart.  

I think about my mantra, “It could always be worse.”  Sometimes I forget.  Tonight a friend of mine reminded me.  I think of these blessings of security, of structural moorings.  Chaos may sit out there like a dragon’s maw prepped to spit blazes, but my current nemesis is apathetic boredom drenched in the acceptance of glacial evolution of logistics.  This is a laughable pittance to such comparisons.  

When I think of my children, I think of the childless.  When I think of my prison time, I think of those encountering such dreaded diagnoses and the lips, ears and minds pondering what is to be.  When I think of occupational quandaries, I think of the honest work I have to do for the collective.  When I think of bank statements I think of those in greater debt and the trail of thoughts to make such trades.  

When I think of the silence, I pour into the songs of Johnny Cash and when the man comes around.  I think of Otis Redding and his plane ride.  I think of bullets and Sam Cooke and John Lennon.  I think of the barrel Kurt Cobain elected.  I think of Woody Guthrie and Joe Strummer.  I think of Springsteen and Bob Dylan.  I think of this time I have left to ponder and most of all to move forward and do.  

I think of ambition and apathy at battle.  I think of the patience to embrace hope and love and not push all those who dare to approach with open hands to take their words with hunger and comforting reciprocation.  I think of the clogged drain of thoughts I have previously debated in solitary.  The journey is not in the judging, but in the release of self.   

I think of the hobos and fascists.  I think of Woody’s train rides and harmonica.  I think of the forest and my father and his father and the deer.  I think of my mother and her books and her body that she refuses to surrender despite its mutiny.  I think of the determination of my brothers to see such beauty in the arts and I dare to claw my variation out of solitary into community.   

I may not venture at a time of my choosing.  I may remain like a meditative monk and at peace with the immobility of body for the freedom of a mind that cares not for metric distance, but of intrapersonal universal contact.  I am in the now independent if I embrace such journeys or not.  

I think of the chest of the child awaiting surgery.  Elevating and descending before he waits for the anesthesia that he knows there is a considerable probability that he may not awake after the injection.  Lives balance in such fear and love.  There is a love of participation that so many have every day and yet to fall into the despair of not choosing, of not seeing we cloak it in the fear of torn down houses, not by tornadoes but by a man’s own hands.   

We may bulldoze the walls, the pictures, the memories of who we were as if we stopped there.  We park in a past of broken fenders and deflated tires.  The jacks and transmissions are traded for wails at the moon and busted fence boards and punched-through sheetrock.  We take happy pills and damn the resilience until we burn the whole pile in effigy of a person we no longer wish to be, but cannot escape from.  

I care not for such self-destruction and so I repeat my mantra with love of self.  I do not think of the damage blanketing the others.  I think of the others shaming me with their self-love.  I think of the others like Steve Gleason with ALS fighting with No White Flags against the inevitable and inspiring a city, the world, his wife, his son; not to be a super-hero, but to show the power of love over fear.  

I repeat my mantra to recall the challenges of others, not to beat myself down, but to inspire what is possible in the super-organism of our collective.  It is in some ways I am speaking to myself through them and such I will speak to myself as I speak to the others.   

I am past the illusion of perdition, of bartering with the Lord for a palatable version of existence.  I am born in meditation and a body I will cherish with patience.  I will carry a grand patience like a banner in my own operating heart.  Each beat, each pulse, each raise of a leg, lift of an arm or turn of abdomen is the very possibility of productive humanity challenging me back in the self-love of knowing what I am blessed with the capability to bring forth for this fleeting indefinite allotment. 

I remember my mantra with a smile.  I may tell the tears and speak into the silence.  I am sharpening the blade in which I will combat the demons from forgetfulness.  My mantra is not to see the universe for its coldness, its depressive damming horror or to see war with its open maw devouring the hearts of good fathers and mothers, no.   

My mantra is for recollection that we are all interconnected in peace and love and what love truly is.  Love is active.  Love is the gravity beyond physical existence achieving the equilibrium of what we are behind these flawed organs and somber shells.  We are drawn by it, whether we can name it or not like our feet pulled back to the Earth.  Some resist confused in its magnetism electing war, anger, isolation, ignorance, judgment, and demands for justice through myopic paradigms.  I seek liberation to act as a conduit for this gravity to pull and be pulled, open and aware usurping the distance which exists beyond our five senses.  

This is my time.  This is our time.  Now is a pinnacle of decision only trumped by the next now in cascading escalation of adulation for the foundation of the cumulative choices over every face gone before us and sharing with us in the present.  We have the now and so in today I have all I need.  There are borders.  There are segments, but I dare say, “It could always be worse.”